With the rapid rise in use of digital cameras and personal computers, the need to display digital images and other digital media content in an attractive and enjoyable manner is becoming increasingly prevalent. Slideshows are one way to display digital images and digital media content and satisfy this need. However, slideshows that merely flash slides on a screen can be boring. To increase the interest, some persons configure their slideshows to play simultaneously with an audio track.
Automated methods for adding an audio track to a slideshow are limited. In one instance, an automated method merely plays an audio track at the same time as a slideshow. A more advanced approach may also loop the audio track if it is not of sufficient length to last for the entire slideshow or else scale the overall length of the audio track to the length of the slideshow. However, these automated approaches provide no correlation between the intensity of the slideshow and the intensity of the audio track, and thus generally produce unacceptable results with regard to matching the slideshow to the audio track in a similar fashion to how a movie score is matched to a movie.
Currently, manual manipulation is the best way, if not the only way, to match a slideshow to an audio track in a similar fashion to the way a soundtrack matches the intensity of a movie. Through manual manipulation, a particular slide or set of slides can be caused to display for more time during a less intense or slower portion of an audio track. Likewise, through manual manipulation, a particular slide or set of slides can be caused to display for less time during a more intense or faster portion of the audio track. This type of manual manipulation can deliver a good result as far as matching a slideshow to an audio track, but it is tedious, time consuming, and may require a great deal of skill.
The prevalence of digital images and media content is increasing, as is the use of slideshows. However, as described, existing methods for matching a slideshow to an audio track are tedious, time consuming, take a great deal of skill, or else deliver poor results.
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